Making Patterns: getting intimate with technology

While high profile, the Apple Watch is hardly a new concept. Activity-tracking devices such as the Fitbit have been popular for a while, and many people’s smartphones so rarely leave their pockets that they might as well be part of their clothing.

As the consumer technology industry is using fashion to sell us more technology, Making Patterns, a new exhibition from Brooklyn-based arts and tech collective Eyebeam, wants us to question our relationship with technology, interfaces, networks and the people around us by bringing together technology-infused items of clothing designed to open up discussion.

At the more playful end is Kaho Abe’s Hotaru, Prototype #1: with two gauntlets embedded with Android smartphones and a projection dome, the piece is as much a video game as a fashion statement. In a world ruined by pollution, two players must cooperate to defeat darkness. One player shoots and the other collects power, and they must hold hands to transfer light between them.

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Elsewhere, artists examine the future possibilities of 3D printing in creating clothes, and the unique bespoke forms and material options that presents. Billy Dang, Andrea van Hintum, and Hilary Sampliner’s Poseidon is a wearable 3D printed garment that moves with the body.

Inspired by denticles – the teeth of a shark – it is a chainmail-like, protective exoskeleton that guards the wearer from the elements. The garment is composed of hundreds of intricate, hinge-like, movable scales but, incredibly, it was printed in one piece.

A Gesture of Sadness (Image: Eyebeam Art + Technology Center)

Cici Wu and Bo Kyung Byun’s A Gesture of Sadness shifts the focus from design and utility to emotional expression. The dress is designed to be worn while lying down, and it was the only item at the exhibition’s opening night to be worn by a live model.

Created by turning the sound wave pattern of one of Wu’s favourite songs (for the record: Lochness Spawn of God by Discombobulation) into a 3D design, it’s not only a physical embodiment of a deeply personal emotion – only possible because of new technology – but it offers a unique take on how we relate to the digital storage and distribution of music.

Then there are a series of clothes created by OCAD University’s Social Body Lab and Intel’s Jamie Sherman that explore a future where digital technologies may allow us, literally, to wear our emotions on our sleeves.

Nautilus, for example, is a mechanical hood designed to cover the wearer’s head like a protective shell. Sensors measure tension in the wearer’s shoulders, automatically activating the hood when they are under threat.

A second piece, Monarch, works in a similar way, with its shoulder-mounted, butterfly-like wings spreading when the wearer feels more assertive. Both aim to explore a future where digital technologies allow us to, quite literally perhaps, wear our emotions on our sleeves.

(Image: Eyebeam Art + Technology Center))

Cardinal, a GPS-equipped felt cowl (see above) that investigates how technology-infused clothing might enhance our sense of directional awareness and social connection. The patterns on the front, back and sides of the garment change colour depending on which way you are facing in relation to people and places connected via a distant GPS beacon, perhaps placed in your home or carried by a family member.

Heat pads facing the direction of the beacon heat up, changing the colour of the thermochromic ink so that you’re reminded of your origins, your home, or wherever is important to you while navigating your daily life, and allowing you to turn and face them at anytime.

As outlandish as the designs look at first glance, in many ways they are the most effective works on display at Making Patterns because the designs’ functionality feel like an extension or exaggeration of existing consumer technologies.

Just as the Apple Watch allows you to transmit your heartbeat to a loved one, or our use of social media lets us broadcast our emotional states, the tech-fashion at this show fits neatly into a world where we are increasingly inseparable from our technology.